Litter Fall Analysis

Kevin Styers

July 6, 2019

Introduction

The NEON Project collects leaf litter in 1m x 1m ‘litter traps,’ spread across a site’s forested plots. Technicians periodically collect, sort, dry, and weigh the litter trap’s contents by functional group. I’ve done some exploratory analysis to look at some macro patterns without a specific goal. I use tidy techniques and ggplot2 with plotly to transform and visualize the NEON Data.

NEON’s Total Litter Weights

by Functional Group

This first plot shows the NEON Project’s total litter collection weights by functional group and Domain ID. The Y-Axis shows the total weigh in grams, the X-Axis filters the data by fuctional group. if you hover your cursor you can see precise weights for functional groups with that Domain.

by DomainID

Now, I’ve switched the x-axis and color variables to show the total of weight each functional group by Domain

by Total Sample Time in Days

by Date

The X-Axis is now the Day of Year. The Y-Axis is the total weight (grams) for that Day of Year.

by Technician

This plot shows technicians with highest sampled litter weight in grams.